Like, hear me out, Libs have always sucked but I remember in High School I was friends with a lot of self IDed capital L liberals, and while they had plenty of :brainworms: of their own, they were generally at least fairly anti-war, not anti-imperialist mind you but generally on the dove-ish side of the spectrum. Several of them attended anti-Iraq war protests and whatnot.
Now suddenly it seems like everyone to the right of Marxist-Leninism is a bloodthirsty hawk. Idk if that’s just social media astroturfing by lanyard types, polling stats seem to suggest the base of the Dem party is less interventionist than the party itself. But, idk, it’s weird how this demographic went from being, at the very least, skeptical of US foreign policy, now all of the sudden wants to nuke Moscow.
I hate, I HATE all the unquestioned liberalisms I held until fairly recently, and question if I am still that liberal but with a cynical coat of paint.
I’d like to harken to Stalin’s vision of dialectics as the study of quantitative changes that lead to qualitative changes. Just keep piling on the heat (Communism) until one day you notice you’re boiling.
I think some people put too much of an emphasis on theory and not enough on history. History has been far more key to my radicalization than theory, though I’m sure there’s the danger of outstripping my own theoretical understanding. And to really just emphasize how much of a meme I am, Michael Parenti lectures helped me a lot in both fields (though he also specializes much more in history).
